Which Book Is Begging to Be Made Into a Movie?
By Dana Stevens
The point is to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
Envisioning
the movie version of a beloved book is at once an act of tenderness and
of violence. Even as you recognize that the thought experiment is
likely to end in failure, you find yourself mentally casting the main
characters, finessing the details of costume and production design,
maybe even framing the opening shot. No film that commits the crass act
of existing could compare with the one that takes shape in your mind as
you read, a project unbeholden to the demands of budget or box-office
draw or, indeed, the laws of time and space. (Want to cast Cary Grant
opposite Cate Blanchett in a screwball update of “Pride and Prejudice”?
Have at it.)
Nor
should the knowledge that great novels rarely make for great films —
and that so-so potboilers often inspire brilliant ones — put a dent in
the would-be adapter’s book-to-movie fantasies. The point of imagining
the movie version of the book as you read isn’t to develop a filmable
script (unless you’re in the unenviable position of actually trying to
get the thing made). It’s to dwell even more deeply in the imaginary
space the book opens up, to love it in a different way.
That’s
why I’m going to go out on a limb and pitch Edith Wharton’s novel “The
Custom of the Country” as a candidate for fantasy adaptation. A kind of
companion-in-reverse to her earlier success, “The House of Mirth,” this
mordantly comic 1913 novel traces not the downward mobility of a refined
young woman, but the upward mobility of a coarse one: Undine Spragg, a
social-climbing Midwestern beauty whose extravagantly ugly name befits
her all-around awfulness. Having manipulated her enabling nouveau riche
parents into relocating to New York, Undine rises high enough in social
circles to snag a well born if not exactly wealthy man, then spends the
rest of the book finagling to trade up to ever richer husbands, cheating
and lying as the occasion requires. Not only does she neglect her young
son, she uses him as collateral in a nasty blackmail scheme. Undine
Spragg is one of literature’s most reprehensible and yet touching
antiheroines, as morally vapid as she is socially adroit, unable to
comprehend her continued dissatisfaction with a life built entirely on
vanity, ambition and greed.
In
the age of reality television and social-media fame, it’s easy to
imagine a contemporarily relevant on-screen Undine, a Real Housewife of
the Gilded Age. I could see her played by Amy Adams in resplendent
period costume (insatiable lust for, and subsequent boredom with,
expensive new clothes being one of Undine’s most salient traits) or by
Busy Philipps in a pink tracksuit in a modern-day update set in Southern
California. The project would require a director who could at once
appreciate the tragic reach of the damage wrought by Undine’s monstrous
selfishness and sympathize with her as an ambitious, appetitive woman
whose era left her few options for advancement outside of aspirational
marriage. Sofia Coppola might be able to pull it off, but as the sole
executive producer of this project, I’m hiring Todd Haynes (or maybe a
time-traveling Douglas Sirk).
There
are scenes from the book I can’t stop picturing on film, like the late
chapter in which Undine’s young son, Paul, left alone for the afternoon
with a houseful of indifferent servants in his mother’s sumptuous Paris
apartment, wanders disconsolately into a bedroom that both belongs to
and resembles his perpetually absent mother: “all pale silks and
velvets, artful mirrors and veiled lamps.” But it’s hard to envision an
adequate cinematic rendering of the novel’s sly, sad, chilling ending,
in which Undine, checking “the glitter of her hair” in the mirror as her
now impeccably A-list party guests begin to arrive, feels a nagging
twinge of resentment that because of her status as a divorcée, she will
never become an ambassador’s wife. No clunky voice-over could convey
that last page’s gossamer irony. But maybe — in my dream adaptation,
anyway — the right actress could do it with just her eyes.
Dana Stevens is
the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest
podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among
other publications.
Comentários
Postar um comentário